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Ontheir first anniversary, Mrs. Jacque-line Kennedy presented her husbandwith his collected speeches to date. Her
hand-written dedication was a quote fromNapoleon, strangely prescient. “Great men aremeteors, consuming themselves to light theworld.” This gift volume is on view in the JohnF. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museumin Boston.
The Library is the fifth of what will be, by2013, more than a dozen presidential libraries(a specific hybrid, defined as archive and muse-um), each maintained in part by The NationalArchives and Records Administration (NARA).The JFK Library (1979) designed by I.M. Pei, issited spectacularly on Columbia Point. Privatedonations from nearly forty million peopleworldwide supported it. It is now surroundedby the attractive Hubway, for bike riding alongthe Harborwalk, and serves an internationalaudience of tourists through self-guided tours,and also twice daily docent-led ones, in addi-tion to its publicly accessible research facility.
The permanent museum narrative is denseand its telling is graphic, direct and accessiblylive, as I describe below. Its fascinating tempo-
rary exhibitions are separate initiatives leverag-ing new partnerships and loans. Collaborationwith the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston marksthe “Focus” type of exhibition—a special pres-entation of one work, with interpretation of itscontext—that we recognize from major muse-ums everywhere. Presentation of the featuredloan, Picasso’s late history painting from theMFA, his Rape of the Sabine Women, 1963, wasshown during the recent anniversary of theCuban Missile Crisis, its political source;Jacques-Louis David and Nicholas Poussin areits artistic sources. The next Focus is a JFK por-trait from 1963 by Elaine de Kooning (with acharcoal sketch) owned by the Library yet com-missioned by the Truman Library, despiteTruman’s personal dislike of contemporary art.De Kooning drew the President in Floridainformally, and profusely. She called him“incandescent.” He seemed a different dimen-sion of being.
Generating traveling exhibitions is anotherstrategic goal of the Library and upcoming isCurator Stacey Bredhoff’s To the Brink: JFK andthe Cuban Missile Crisis, assembled by Bredhoffwith the National Archives, to open in Boston
April 12. It features secretly recorded WhiteHouse tapes, video segments, original arti-facts, documents and photographs informedby the latest scholarship (writers Ted Widmer,Michael Dobbs and Tim Naftali).Commemorating the tragic anniversary of the1963 assassination further suggests the textureof contemporary curatorial activities. A shorttribute exhibition has the working title, ANation Remembers.
Everywhere in the permanent collection isexciting visual culture presented in the origi-nal. We are immersed in 1960s telepromptertexts, screen-printed campaign posters, full-fledged reenactments of election night sus-pense in period technology (vintage photog-raphy, film, audio, TV broadcast), and more.Overall content is the public and privatePresident Kennedy during his White Houseyears, while a senator, and in his naval PT109days. Papers by Robert F. Kennedy and bymore than 300 of the President’s associates areincluded in the library, supporting exhibi-tions, and there is also the Ernest HemingwayCollection holding nearly all of that literaryfigure’s manuscripts and correspondence.
Whereas Washington today speaks inces-santly of budget balancing, President Kennedyenvisioned and brought to reality wondrouslyvisionary, universal ideas, like the Apollo 11mission and civil rights legislation. He averteda nuclear war, launched the Peace Corps, andbrought the Ernest Hemingway Papers to thiscountry, to a room of their own. (Thanks toMary Hemingway, they ultimately arrivedcovertly from Cuba on a shrimp boat. It isunusual for a Presidential Library to showcasea literary collection, yet JFK was a fan whoquoted Hemingway in his Profiles in Couragebook: “Courage is grace under fire.”)
Interest in the arts and culture distinguishesthe Kennedy administration. Catalan cellistPablo Casals performed in a White Houserestored by Mrs. Kennedy; she was also instru-mental in securing the loan of Leonardo’sMonaLisa to the National Gallery of Art, and shecame permanently to represent a new leader-ship model for arts and culture involvement bythe White House. The Kennedy White Housewas simultaneously “timely and timeless,” toquote Lee Statham of the non-profit John F.Kennedy Library Foundation. It was civicallyand culturally engaged, and that ethos contin-
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ues years later through the educational pro-grams of the Library.
In addition to its Distinguished Service,New Frontier, and Profile in Courage Awards(with a complementary essay contest for highschool students), and the annual PENHemingway Award for fiction, the Librarywidely educates through its Forum series ofpublic programming, and does so brilliantly.The fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of manybreakthrough events are happening now. A
sampling of their participants, from the musi-cians Paul Simon and Elvis Costello, throughhistorian Sergei Khrushchev, Senator JohnLewis, Attorney General Eric Holder, to theinteractive websites cloudsovercuba.com andwechoosethemoon.org, signals the enduringKennedy legacy for audiences on site andremotely.
Ongoing programs, and free admission foryoung children ages five and up plus free fami-ly days and the Celebrate! Performing Arts
series for families require generous underwrit-ing. An aptly named New Frontier Networkhas been created to encourage a younger phil-anthropic audience to be educational and civic-minded. Conan O’Brien is its honorary chair.
The Library offers a T-stop and bus shuttleconnection, there is the Hubway to bike upon,and administrators also seek to enable aspeedy boat connection over the water that sogloriously constitutes the view from the muse-um. They desire ever more interactivity withnew generations, to paraphrase their mission,“in order to perpetuate JFK’s ideal that politi-cal and public service be conducted as an hon-orable, patriotic profession.”
It is worthwhile to recall what John F.Kennedy said himself in his 1960 acceptancespeech: “we stand today on the edge of a newfrontier […] a frontier of unknown opportuni-ties and perils…” Strangely enough, an assis-tant to President Truman, David Lloyd, charac-terized the de Kooning portrait itself as beingin an appropriately modern style of art, a “newfrontier.” The Kennedy Library significantlydemonstrates that art and politics can forge aneasy unity when both are pioneers.
Judith Tolnick Champa is the editor-in-chief forArt New England.
Left to Right: Exterior view of the John F. KennedyPresidential Library and Museum. Pablo Picasso, Rape ofthe Sabine Women, 1963, oil on canvas. Juliana CheneyEdwards Collection, Tompkins Collection—Arthur GordonTompkins Fund, and Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory ofAlice Thevin. 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York. Photograph Courtesy of Museumof Fine Arts, Boston. Portrait of Kennedy by Elaine deKooning. Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy PresidentialLibrary and Museum. Photo: Joel Benjamin.
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